With the release of last year’s conversational documentary Leap of Faith: In Conversation with William Friedkin, one thing has become abundantly clear — people are…
Kelly Reichardt’s 2006 film Old Joy has been on my mind of late, a fact that I initially attributed to some combination of nostalgia for…
Horror-comedy is one of the hardest cinematic lines to toe, but 1981’s An American Werewolf in London is perhaps the greatest existing instance of that…
If ever evidence was needed of art criticism’s role as a passing functionary in the workings of cultural amusement and consumption, one need look no…
Jerzy Skolimowski had a distinctive output well before he ended up in London. He began his film career in his native Poland with three successive…
While he appeared in many of his own cinematic works (including one of his most well-known, 1968’s Razor Blades), multi-media artist Paul Sharits didn’t primarily…
“We get it — you’re different!” That’s what I’d say to Enid (Thora Birch), adopting the same cynical, ironic tone she applies to everything in…
Of the many ontological experiments Ken Jacobs has crafted over the last half-century — which have varied between different artistic mediums, lengths, modes, and, especially…
Delmer Daves has his deserved champions, but even so, he’s an interesting sell; not a hard one, per se, but one that’s mildly inundated with…
Hal Hartley occupies a curious position in the American film scene. While he might reasonably be called an icon of the independent film scene and…
Brian De Palma is the great voyeur, the plump-bellied pervert, of American cinema. His films have a singularly sleazy feel, gloriously gaudy and admirable in…
“I find ghosts in Japanese horror much more terrifying. In the standard American horror canon, because a ghost violently attacks you or comes after you,…
In Hong Kong’s tropical humidity, where sweltering bodies cram around mahjong tables or hunch over noodle stands, how can two people in a forbidden romance…
Each one of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s films is a series of echoes and recurrences, palimpsests of what has preceded and teasing forebears of what’s to follow.…
George Romero’s two 1978 releases, Dawn of the Dead and Martin, represent the director at the apex of his career as an artist who had…
Though the films of John Cassavetes are often erroneously described as “improvised” or “verite,” claims that belie Cassavetes’s formal fidelity, it was a modernist, Virginia…
During an interview with Jump Cut in 1976, director Monte Hellman described Two-Lane Blacktop as such: “It’s a film about inner life rather than outer…
Premiering at the 2005 Berlin Film Festival, before going on to win the prestigious Dragons & Tigers Award for emerging Asian cinema at that same…
How do you get away with the perfect murder? Easy: get someone else to do it for you. Such is the premise of Alfred Hitchcock’s…
Director Alan J. Pakula helped usher in a decade of gritty, morally ambiguous New York thrillers with 1971’s Klute, a nervy neo-noir starring Donald Sutherland…
In the opening minutes, an individual practices tennis serves to no one. After every two serves, there is a momentary black screen. Some serves are…